Transnational Exchange and the Early Modern World (NeMLA 2019)

How material exchange and mobility affect people and their ideas? How do these subjects and these objects transform the place of destination and its practices, knowledge, texts, and understanding of the world? This panel will address the consequences of the mobility of subjects and the exchange of objects in the early modern world. Early modernity is a time strongly characterized by the increasing crossing of boundaries. In this sense, this panel wants to analyze how material exchange enables different cultures to cross borders and permeate different social spaces, modifying those who import them and those who export them.

Mindful of the current interest in transnational literature and global history (Wallerstein, Manning, Adelman, among others), this panel aims to foster a thought-provoking dialogue between different perspectives and approaches. Thus, we accept proposals that study transnational exchanges from different disciplines (cultural studies, literature, history of art, religious studies, history of the book, music, philosophy) and diverse literary, historical, or artistic traditions. The primary goal of this panel is to map a panorama of circulation of subjects and objects in early modernity in order to reveal new subjective, material, and discursive relationships.